


the wound in the heart to the heart itself

by toujours_nigel



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Animal Death, Blood and Injury, Canon Disabled Character, Career Ending Injuries, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 12:45:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16954284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: Laurie goes into the hospital. Ralph realises he's in no state to drive.





	the wound in the heart to the heart itself

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Philipa_Moss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philipa_Moss/gifts).



> as always, all thanks to my beta to whom I sent every line of this story as I wrote it.
> 
> Title from 'Night at Dunkirk (1945) by Louis Aragon.

_Well_ , Ralph thought, watching Laurie walk carefully with his cane up the wide asphalt path between the hospital huts, _that's Spud home safe_. A door opened, briefly haloing Laurie, and clammed shut.

After a minute Ralph started the car and eased it down the path, craning an uncomfortable neck to check behind himself. It looked like Neverland, the hospital mushrooming up in the dark. With his luck there would be a crunch in the moment, someone's favourite cat come scampering under the wheels. He had had close calls a few times, with rabbits, once had to stop and put a hedgehog to rest after it had been too slow getting out of the way. It had been a difficult thing to keep hold of as it thrashed and tried to curl up, offer defence, and he had found blood beneath his nails for days. One day it might be something bigger and better loved, with everything so impossible to see; he could imagine, quite easily, a roe deer or retriever, looking up with lambent eyes as he bent over it. There had to be a veterinary hospital somewhere around, with all the farms; he'd have to ask Theo, who had friends everywhere. He could not think, just then, how he would go about lifting an injured animal the size of even an yearling buck into his car, but something would make itself clear in the moment. Melrose had used to say... but nothing he'd ever said had made it into Ralph's memory past the static of whiskey in his blood. Fortification, necessary, pity he still couldn't, Alec had liberated a beautiful single malt from his mother's collection, two... three years ago, and Ralph had had a humiliating rendezvous with the loo shortly after the first swallow. It would almost be easier, with an eye to later hospitalisation, to run over a person instead. He could think of any number who would deserve it more than Laurie had, the shard of bone sticking out, the shattered knee, the white face grimly clenched against pain.

He couldn't drive like this, wouldn't have liked to try it in anything resembling traffic. He didn't look to see whether his hands trembled as he coasted to a stop, but the flame of his lighter flickered as he held it to a cigarette, and the cigarette... well, the damned glove didn't bloody help. He held lighter and lit cigarette together in his right hand and tugged it off with his teeth, placing it carefully in the glove compartment before he acted on a lasting impulse and tossed it into the neighbouring field. Let them see what he was, one bit of truth wouldn't kill anyone.

It was talking about Dunkirk that did it, of course. He couldn't lie to himself about it, when repeated attempts yielded identical results. If he tried a little he could convince himself he didn't remember it, the injured in their groaning lines, the planes strafing the sand, the Stukas, Adley shot on the second trip out and the pom-pom gun still warm from his gloves when Ralph took over. He knew better in his dreams, Norris telling him about Laurie who was suddenly George instead, his poor cold face flickering from ghastly pale to richly dark, the hair coruscating from red to gold to black. He didn't talk about it if he could help. He had had time before the _Cayton-Wyke_ fished him out, to think everything he wanted, and more confined in hospital to a bed he didn't need, writing letters to everyone he could remember. A handful; they'd taken on new crew after ~~George~~  Scapa Flow, on what ought have been their way back to Narvik. He hardly remembered their names now, all of it gone in the white pain that hung over those hours, every limb going every minute colder. He shouldn't like to know what **he'd** said, to anyone on the _Cayton-Wyke_. Theo would know, Theo had kept him quiet, bandaged his hand and rubbed rough warmth into him.

It must have been Theo who had warned off the rest from asking him about Dunkirk. Alec had, of course, but he could take it from Alec, who had in fact spent his off-duty hours sitting with Ralph. None of the others had had visitors and Alec had had no business dragging a stool up from the nurse's table. In kinder moments he could admit Sandy perhaps had reason, but he was particularly inclined to be unkind to Sandy just then. Anyway Ralph had been grateful for him, had needed him there: after they told him about his hand, after the febrile letter he'd sent to Laurie came back marked deceased, after Eileen's reply to his letter came with a photo of George tucked in its folds. Ralph had taken it all in with a dull flat relaxation, which a less self-aware man might have taken for relief.

In the same way he had absorbed both the fact of being rescued and the price of being barred from further command. He wouldn't have to know whether he _had_ lost his nerve with his ship; he wouldn't have laid good odds on navigating back if shore hadn't been within sight, and couldn't shake the conviction that he should have been able to dodge the Stuka that did for them.

Nobody else had asked, and he'd surprised himself by laughing, meaning it, when Bunny had looked at his hand and up again and said, "Well, that'll make this easier," and thrown a tin of coconut oil at him.

It had helped that Bunny had not known him before, that Bunny liked himself too well to have much use for others, that he wanted Ralph primarily as a warm body with a dependably high libido and no inclinations towards jealousy. It was the socio-sexual equivalent of about five of Alec's toothache tablets after two stiff doubles. Bunny simply didn't care, while everyone else stared and whispered and expected hospital to have fixed Ralph's head or his hand

He had been the sort of child who kept count of his scars and scrapes, told them over to his father and later to himself in a litany of achievements. Half his hand at Dunkirk sounded well enough in a story, but he didn't even know what did for it, a bullet or sharp-edged machinery as they went down, or seeping cold, or crawling infection. He had had it, salt-bitten and bleeding, as they pulled him up from the sea, and he had had it under bandages, coated with Sulfa, as he went into hospital, and then he hadn't. He should be grateful they managed to save the rest of it, he's been given to understand it was difficult enough.

Wonderful, the miracles surgeons and doctors were performing to keep pushing them all an inch or two further, Bim hopped up on bennies, talking the purest rubbish with Laurie. Laurie's leg, how _had_ they done that? Sandy would know, but it would all come out in medical jargon and be gossip-fodder after. But really it was marvellous. Ralph hadn't been surprised his friend had thought he was dead, or Norris either, or really when the letter had come back. He'd assumed it was the leg that had killed him, septicaemia or loss of blood or something. Not expected Spuddy at one of Alec's parties looking around bright and bird-like, oddly impossible.

Laurie hadn't changed, except to become more himself: the quiet competence at carrying out orders, the unexpected flashes of pigheaded defiance, all of it Ralph could have drawn forward in time from the scared, stubborn boy in his study seven years ago. In sleep the slight mark of years rolled from his face: he could have been fifteen, huddled into a blanket at the end of a hike; he’d been one of the Nature Club the preservation of which had been Hugh's great cause when Jeepers took over. Ralph had gone with them once or twice, for practice for when he would be leading surveys, and Laurie'd used to fall asleep right off, curled up against a convenient tree, had to be roused to make it into a tent. Ralph had left all the business of chivying him and the other fourth-formers to Hugh, declaredly because he wasn't part of the Club as much as accompanying them, but really he'd wanted to brush the hair off Laurie's forehead, or wake him--impossibly and idiotically--with a kiss. Very likely he'd been stealing too many of Elaine's romance novels over the summer. He had known better than to try it then, and certainly oughtn't have tried it fifteen... twenty minutes ago, by his watch. But it had worked, anyway, and Laurie, waking, had offered him the sort of smile that had made Ralph want to drive him around for hours, aimless.

"The Odyssey," Ralph said, and laughed. "Still the same old Spud."

A horse came to investigate when he started the car again, only its eyes and teeth shining, coat dark enough it melted into the night. He wouldn't have liked to meet it on the road, and even on the other side of a fence it looked intelligent, ferocious, likely to bite or kick if deprived of what it wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear Philipa,
> 
> I hope you get a good story which prominently features all the characters you requested. I have been made aware that this is not such a story, and cannot apologise enough for its flaws.
> 
> -A Very Bad Yule Goat


End file.
